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You don't need to ask 100% of the users to get the full picture. That's how statistics work. You can actually prove (mathematically) that this is true. Of course there is always an error margin, but you will have that too, if you count anyone, because you cannot guarantee that you counted everyone correctly + those, who don't want to be count, etc. pp. (also who do you count and how active do they have to be?). So you just ask 1k - 3k persons (randomly) and get the same result.

For gaming I'm just about to build a new computer that I plan to set up as a duel boot.
I'm hoping that I'll be able to do most of my gaming and stuff in linux and not have to go to windows except for the occasional game.

Yeah, it seems crazy, is it really a Survey? Meaning do they ask people? Why not collect statistics? For people playing online, they could aggregate the number of hours each player stays online, per operating system. Another clear cut statistic would be number of downloads per platform. Oh well.

Where this kinda hurts is in that being 1, maybe 2% of the population makes it hard for them to spend too much in porting games. I think the main motivation could be to be ready to support Linux based consoles, android gaming platforms, Chromebooks (if they ever make Crouton an official "app"), etc. It has been clear for a while that people won't massively jump to Linux traditional desktops, as wonderful as they are these days.

You don't need to ask 100% of the users to get the full picture. That's how statistics work. You can actually prove (mathematically) that this is true. Of course there is always an error margin, but you will have that too, if you count anyone, because you cannot guarantee that you counted everyone correctly + those, who don't want to be count, etc. pp. (also who do you count and how active do they have to be?). So you just ask 1k - 3k persons (randomly) and get the same result.

I disagree, i believe all surveys like this are heavily flawed (since if you only survey such a small amount you could easily miss out most of the Linux users just because it's such a small group), especially Steam's, have you seen the bug report about it not even showing up for people on Linux? It has happened to me, I'm on Steam everyday and am yet to see it, logged in once on Windows in the last month and got it (the same day i was logged into Steam on Linux right before and directly after - no survey).

I think this is a catch 22 sort of situation. Without enough games there will be a lot of holdouts that will stick to windows because there are more games there, but without enough gamers there isn't much of an incentive to make games for linux. As more Valve games get ported over for the steam box there will probably be more people switching over, and if the steam box does well there will be more devs making Linux games for it.